Dawkins: in reply to a quote from hos own book, “The God Delusion”
Book p126 says “One of the truly bad effects of religion, is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding”

Dawkins reply[00:18:00]

“Science uses evidence to discover the truth about the universe. It’s been getting better at it over the centuries, in the teeth of opposition from religion, although it has t be admitted that of course science grew out of a religions tradition. Religion teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding.I think that when you consider the beauty of the world, and you wonder how it came to be what it is, you’re naturally overwhelmed with a feeling of awe, a feeling of admiration and you almost feel a desire to worship something. I feel this, I recognise that other scientists such as as Carl Sagan feel this, Einstein felt it. We all of us us share a kind of religious reverence for the beauties of the universe, for the complexity of life, for the sheer magnitude of the cosmos, the sheer magnitude of geological time.And it’s tempting to translate that feeling of awe and worship into a desire to worship some particular thing, a person, an agent. You want to attribute it to a maker, to a creator.What science has now achieved, is an emancipation from that impulse to attribute these things to a creator, and it’s a MAJOR emancipation, because humans an almost overwhelming desire to think that they’ve explained something by attributing it to a maker. We’re so used to explaining things in our own world, like these television cameras, like the lights, like everything we make, the clothes we wear, the chairs we sit on, everything we see around us is a manufactured object, and so it’s so tempting to believe that living things or that the stars or mountains or rivers have all been made by something. It was a supreme achievement of the humam intellect, to realise that there is a better explanation for these things. That these things can come about by purely natural causes.

When science began, the aim to achieve it was there was there, but we didn’t know enough. Nowadays at the end of the 20th Century, beginning of the 21st century, we still don’t know everything, but we’ve achieved an enormous amount in the way of understanding, we now understand essentially how life came into being. We KNOW that we are all cousins of all animals and plants. We know that we’re descended from a common ancestor what might have been something like bacteria, we know the process by which that came about. We don’t know the details but we understand essentially how it came about. There are still gaps in our understanding, we don’t understand how the cosmos came into existence in the first place, but we’re working on that. The scientific enterprise is an active seeking, an active seeking out of gaps in our knowledge, seeking of ignorance so we can work to plug that ignorance, but religion teaches us to be satisfied with not really understanding.

Every one of these difficult questions that comes up, science says ‘right, lets roll up our sleeves and work on it”, religion says “oh God did it. We don’t need to work on it, God did it.” It’s as simple as that. We have no thrusting force pushing us on to try to understand. Religion stultifies the impulse to understand because religion provides a facile easy apparent explanation and it prevents the further work on the problem.”